ICARUS WITCH

The band's story and the one behind the upcoming album as told by Jason Myers "The band had been going pretty hard for a solid decade. Album after album, tour after tour. The grind was starting to wear down the machine. I needed to pump the brakes for a minute and reevaluate. So after the RISE cycle, I moved to Salem, Massachusetts for a while to reconnect with my Witchcraft roots that I'd been neglecting in the often unspiritual world of band life. While living in Witch City, the inspiration and song ideas started to come back but writing remotely wasn't cutting it so eventually I moved back to Pittsburgh to get back to work. In the interim some of the guys had moved onto other projects but Quinn and I remained determined to create the type of well-crafter, large production album we'd always wanted to. It's fair to say that we spent a good two years working on this album to get it right. When our demos had gone as far as we could take them we enlisted the vocal talents of Brimstone Coven crooner, Andrew D'Cagna who Quinn had been playing guitar for in his other band Ironflame. Andrew took our raw demos into his studio and returned them with a magical vocal treatment that literally gave me chills. We knew we'd found the voice for the next phase of the band so all that was left was to find the best drummer available to lay down the beats that would become the foundation of the new album. As it happened, Jon Rice was back in Pittsburgh between tours with Behemoth and Skeleton Witch and he had a few weeks to kill so, at the suggestion of a mutual friend, David Gehlke, we hired Jon for the sessions and he crushed it beyond our expectations. With Pittsburgh extreme metal wunderkind Shane Mayer engineering and some valuable pre-production notes from legendary producer, Neil Kernon we tracked the album in the winter of this year. Then we handed off the mixing duties to a rising studio star, Atlanta-based Brad Cox who Quinn met through his working relationship with Mike Clink of Guns 'N' Roses fame. Finally we had the album mastered in Sweden by our friend Erik Martensson whose made a name for himself not only as the main main for melodic rock gods, Eclipse, but as the go-to engineer for so many of those Frontiers AOR gems. Though we'd originally planned to have Travis Smith create the art, he was unavailable at the time but offered some encouragement and tips. We ended up producing all of the album art in-house with our graphic designer Aubrianna Veitz who had been an integral part of the art direction on RISE. The occult nautical imagery was inspired by the figureheads that adorn the cobblestone streets and ships around the Salem harbor, thus bringing the whole project full-circle and tying in with the recurring themes of sirens, fortune tellers and possessions. Though the title "Goodbye Cruel World" may sound like the first line of a suicide note, we actually see it in a positive light -- bidding farewell to the past and to the negative things that anchored you or restrained you from discovering your best life. Isn't that what we all strive for in the end?"https://www.facebook.com/icaruswitch/